Greenpeace

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years working for the environment, it’s that you should never talk about global warming in the wintertime.  Either we’ve just gotten two feet of snow and people look at you like you’re crazy, or it’s 65 degrees in February and the person you’re talking to thinks it’s a good thing.  One of the problems with global warming is the term itself.  It doesn’t really capture the urgency of the problem the way, say, “nuclear meltdown” or “acid rain” tends to come across.  It might even sound good to some.  Who doesn’t like it warm?  What we’re really talking about is climate instability.  With a continuing increase in the world’s temperatures, climate and weather patterns are becoming more volatile.  A high percentage of the American public associates the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with the pattern of severe weather that scientists have been predicting for years would result from climate change.  Given that the force of the storm was due in large part to the unusually warm temperature of the water in the Gulf, it’s a reasonable assumption.  Add to that the alarming rate at which the ice cap is melting in the Arctic and consider the domino effect it could have across the globe, and you start to get the picture.

In the past three decades, over one million square miles of sea ice – an area the size of Norway, Denmark and Sweden combined – has disappeared.  Yeah, I know.  Sea ice.  Excuse me while I start thinking about baseball.  How about the fact that the melting taking place in the Arctic is posing a serious threat to the existence of polar bears?  Yep, that cute and cuddly icon (okay, so it could take your head off if you tried to actually cuddle with it) is facing the possibility of extinction as a result of global warming.  They depend on the ice to hunt, and with the melting taking place and the ice season becoming shorter and shorter, the bears can’t hunt to the level they need, and are often forced into extended periods of fasting.  As a result, they can no longer build up the fat upon which they rely to keep them healthy.  This in turn affects their ability to survive and reproduce.  In 2004, the population count for polar bears was down to 950 – a 14 percent decline from counts in 1995.

So Greenpeace is suing the federal government to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.  As a result, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it is initiating the process to list them as threatened, due to the destruction their habitat is experiencing as a result of global warming.  A listing under the ESA would grant considerable protection for the bears, and would force the US government, which has thus far stuck its head in the sand on the issue of climate change, to consider the impacts that large emissions of greenhouse gases have on the polar bear’s habitat.  It would essentially force them to play with the rest of the world in addressing this crucial issue.

So even if you’re a heartless pragmatist who could give a flip about some bear a long, long ways away from your living room and daily commute, consider this.  The polar bear is the proverbial canary in the coal mine (I thought about saying “tip of the ice berg”, but it didn’t pass the eye roll test when I tried it out on a few people).  They are just the beginning of a much larger problem.  By taking measures today to save the polar bear, we will also be taking a large step towards solving the crucial problem of climate change. Which means we will ultimately be taking critical steps towards saving ourselves.