Friends may recall that, six months ago, as I was crossing Indiana, I posted an essay here talking briefly about the plight of the polar bears.
Because of the changing climate, the sea ice around the North Pole is disappearing. In the western part of Hudson Bay, the ice sheet covering the water is breaking up, on average, two and a half weeks earlier in the spring than it did thirty years ago.
This leaves polar bears less time each year to hunt on the ice for ringed seals, who are the main calorie source in their diet. So the bears are malnourished, female bears’ reproductive rates are down, cub mortality rates are up — and the local bear population fell twenty-one per cent just in the seven years from 1997 to 2004.
Bears in Alaska are challenged by the fact that the distances from ice floe to ice floe are growing. Thus they must swim longer distances, and in September 2004 alone, four were found drowned. Bears were also seen killing and eating one another to survive.
There aren’t that many polar bears to begin with — just 25,000 worldwide, 4,500 in Alaska. As the polar ice finishes melting in the next thirty-five years or so, it could be the end of the bears.
Photo by Dan Guravich, copyright © 2006 Polar Bears International. Check them out!
— Which brings us to today’s news. According to an anonymous official in the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Bush regime has caved in under the pressure of a lawsuit from three environmental organizations, and is about to propose that polar bears be listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
(This is the same Endangered Species Act that soon-to-be-ex-U.S.-Representative Pombo was trying hard to repeal, or at least gut, this very year.)
A listing of polar bears under the Act — if it indeed happens — will constitute a formal written admission from the Bush regime that global warming is real and is threatening at least one well-known and beloved species.
If you have friends still denying that global warming is happening, this might perhaps be something to share with them. (I trust you all to wait on the Guide, to show you when and how to talk about it.)
This news might also help them become more conscious of that other, less talked about, but even more critical environmental crisis — species extinction.
The Washington Post reported on this development here. The Los Angeles Times reported on it here.
If your friends happen to be near a computer when you talk to them about the bears, you might also show them this animated map from the National Arbor Day Foundation, which shows how the zones at which different plants will grow have all marched northward across the U.S. from 1990 to 2006. (I am grateful to Karen Street and her blog A Musing Environment for calling attention to this pointer.)
Thanks, friends all, for paying attention.