by Jon Mooallem
Polar Bears International had flown Derocher to Churchill while I was there. Among other things, they wanted him on hand for the Martha Stewart taping. He is a towering, affable guy, and among the world’s most respected authorities on polar bears. When I knocked on the door of the sparsely furnished rental house PBI had put him up in, he and one of his graduate students had just finished watching the new Nissan Leaf commercial online—the one with the polar bear hugging the commuter. “It really is kind of depressing that the animal I’ve spent a long time studying is being used as the motivator to buy a car,” Derocher said. He was ambivalent about the way polar bears had infiltrated popular culture in general—“I can’t go anywhere without seeing polar bears,” he told me—and was skeptical of electric cars as a solution to climate change in the first place, since they’d wind up plugged into an electric grid that often relied on coal.
Derocher has studied Churchill’s bears since he was a student in the mid-eighties. He explained that the bears lose about two pounds every day that they’re on land. And so a bear’s body mass when it comes off the ice in the spring is one measure of how likely it is to survive until the next freeze-up, of “how much gas is in the tank.” Derocher’s mentor, Ian Stirling, has described healthy bears as resembling “big tubs of jelly with little, stubby legs sticking out.” By fall, a bear in poorer condition will have a leaner profile, like a hunting dog. A starving bear will start to resemble a duffel bag with a bunch of wrenches clunking around inside.
Still, the big drain on the population so far doesn’t appear to be adult bears dying of starvation, but a flickering out of the new generations meant to take their place. Derocher has shown that females with less fat on them when they come off the ice in the spring give birth to smaller cubs. And smaller cubs are less likely to survive. Slimmer mothers also produce fewer cubs. (Twins and triplets in the population are becoming less common.) Females that become so weakened while waiting for freeze-up may also shut down their ability to nurse to conserve energy, and their cubs will starve. Or else they forgo reproduction in the first place. Derocher has shown that females whose body mass fell below about 415 pounds were unable to reproduce successfully, and they are all being quickly driven in that direction. (Derocher tracks females with satellite collars; he recently had to order new, smaller collars, because the old ones are now too big for the shrinking bears.) If all the females reach that reproductive point of no return, with no young surviving, it would just be a matter of waiting for the adults bears to die out. Suddenly, the polar bears of Churchill would be a society with no children.
The general trend, from here on out, will be for increasingly longer summer seasons. The bears will return to the ice later and later in the fall, in worse and worse condition, and with fewer and fewer cubs. The coastline where the Tundra Buggies roam may gradually morph into something akin to a polar bear refugee camp, a holding area for despondent, gaunt animals with no ice in front of them and no place to go. There will be good years among the bad years—colder, with earlier freeze-ups. But there may also be catastrophic years, when the ice melts extremely early in the spring and re-forms extremely late in the fall or winter, and a disproportionate chunk of the population gets knocked off all at once, unable to wait it out. Nothing says that Churchill’s polar bears will disappear in a gradual, linear way, Derocher told me. It could be quick if just the wrong succession of sudden shocks plays out. Recently, at a meeting of Canadian wildlife officials, Derocher suggested that plans ought to be drawn up for short-term crisis scenarios: “What if some sort of freak thing happened, and freeze-up didn’t start until late December? What are you going to do if you end up with forty bears that are starving? Do you want to euthanize them? Do you want to pick them up in a helicopter and release them somewhere else? Do you want to feed them? Bring them to a zoo?” His point was acknowledged but not dwelled on, he said.
By 2050, Derocher told me, Hudson Bay is expected to stop freezing at all; it will be open water year-round. No matter how the particulars in Churchill have played out by then, the sea ice—the polar bear’s true home—will have vanished entirely. If any bears are left outside town, they will vanish with it.
There are eighteen other populations of polar bears on the planet, and over the next century, a different story will unfold in each. Seven of them are already known to be declining, though less steeply than Churchill’s. Some of the populations at the highest latitudes may increase temporarily, as more seals and walruses—animals the bears eat—shift their own ranges north, chasing a colder climate. Some bear populations might only appear to increase, since polar bears will be hungry enough to roam closer to Arctic villages in search of food, and people will see the animals more frequently. And a small number of bears, scientists project, will survive into the next century on pockets of ice around northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Islands—and maybe indefinitely if, in the near future, the world actually starts to make the sort of wholesale, politically unpopular shifts needed to slow climate change.
That is, when environmentalists like Robert Buchanan say they are fighting to save the polar bear, what they mean is bleaker than it sounds: they are fighting to save some polar bears, these ones in the very far north that still, theoretically at least, could be preserved like a keepsake. Robert, for his part, seems to prefer to talk more about humanity’s opportunity to preserve the polar bear species, rather than break down the scenarios for each individual population. He never ducks the scientific reality. But it would undermine his message of building hope and motivating action to concede, while preaching to television crews on Buggy One, that it’s too late to save the particular polar bears wandering behind him in the shot. In even a best-case scenario, the species will be withdrawn into those shrunken sanctuaries at the top of the world and recede into an even more distant and wild abstraction, a creature once again unreachable by tourists and celebrities and their cameras. At that point, the bear will live on mostly in whatever legends we are beginning to tell about it now.
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ONE NIGHT, I was invited for beers at Churchill’s Royal Canadian Legion Hall. When I arrived, I found a long table of men in Carhartt overalls and quilted flannel shirts decompressing after work. The national news was on in the corner, and the men hollered and shushed one another when a report about Martha Stewart’s visit came on the television. Everyone paid attention, but hardly anyone said anything when it was over. They mostly just groaned or huffed air through their noses.
I’d been spending a lot of time hanging around the entrepreneurial second tier of Churchill’s tourism industry, getting to know many of the same weather-beaten men who’d helped pioneer the industry twenty and thirty years ago. I liked them. And, I’ll admit it, I enjoyed it in a very high-schoolish way whenever I walked into Gypsy’s Bakery and got waved over to sit with them at the table in front of the pastry case—the table always understood to be held just for them, even during the mightiest mealtime rush of classic tourists. But none of them believed climate change was endangering the town’s polar bears, no matter how clear-cut the science seemed to me, and this had a way of stunting conversation. No one was worried, and they brushed the prospect aside so casually, with such genial sarcasm, that I sometimes felt embarrassed about bringing it up. As one man put it to me: “Yeah. The bears are all fucking dropping through the ice, because it’s melting and drowning them. Right.”
Nevertheless, many of them could rattle off changes in the climate that they’d noticed with their own eyes. The summer was clearly longer. The vegetation was bigger. Moose were more common. So were robins. (“It used to be a really big deal to see a robin up here,” one guy said.) In fact, the main economic hope for the town these days is that a longer season of open water on Hudson Bay will bring more ships into Churchill’s seaport and that, eventually, the town will become Canada’s outpost for trade with Russia, with ships loading up with grain from the prairies and navigating a new, ice-free Northwest Passage.
Still,
nearly all the locals I met were convinced this warming was just part of a natural cycle. And the presumption was, if the change in the climate were natural, as opposed to man-made, the polar bears were somehow inherently equipped to withstand it. Maybe the bears’ numbers would shrink, but they’d muddle through until the climate corrected itself and there was plenty of ice again.
Everyone came back to an image of the polar bear as an invincible eating machine. Many of these men spend a good part of their year on the land, hunting and trapping; they know the bears don’t technically “fast” through the summer months, as biologists tend to put it. “The polar bear eats,” Mark Ingebrigtson, a former mayor of Churchill, told me. “He gets the odd seal, the odd whale.” People told me about bears they’d seen tearing through berry bushes. They’d seen them pillage goose nests and inhale the eggs. One man described watching a polar bear lie in wait while a caribou herd blew past, then pounce on the last animal in line and devour it. Another claimed to have watched a bear leap from the bank of the Churchill River onto the back of a beluga and drag the whale to shore like a Labrador fetching a floppy, inflatable pool toy. A male bear can easily weigh twelve hundred pounds. It can run twenty or twenty-five miles an hour and be at full speed after only a few strides. They are opportunists, I was told, and can eat virtually anything they want. Even if the ice recedes, they are not going to “stand around starving” onshore.
Recently, some of these same adaptation theories have been argued out in scientific journals.* But the consensus remains that the polar bear, as a species, simply can’t last by haphazardly grabbing calories on land. It takes a huge amount of energy to keep a polar bear operating. (According to one study, if a polar bear chased a goose for more than twelve seconds it would have burned more calories than it gained by eating the goose.) It’s not a coincidence that the animals have evolved to eat ringed seals—hapless globs of fat, which they hunt by lying perfectly still next to a seal’s breathing hole and waiting for it to surface. Everything else is just snacks. Individual, innovative bears or pockets of bears may manage to outlast others for a while, but the ice is slipping away too fast for the species to re-engineer its metabolism and evolve. When ice receded after the last ice age, a population of polar bears around southern Scandinavia died out in almost exactly the same way.
But the argument in Churchill wasn’t really scientific anyway. It was, I realized, a more philosophical fight about what the animal is capable of, the character of the beast. People in Churchill live in the bear’s world and see polar bears do clever and creative things. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize the animals, to see them as having a humanlike capacity for problem solving that makes them, like us, nearly invincible, and to assume they’ll adapt, even if we never thought to expect such ingenuity from a less impressive critter like the copper-striped blue-tailed skink, a lizard in Hawaii, when the ecology it was a part of changed. (The skink was last seen on Kauai in the 1960s; in 2012, the government officially declared it extinct.) In other words, biologists recognize the polar bear as just one cog in a Darwinian machine—one that will drop out when the structure holding it up deteriorates. But people in town see it as a menacing and capable agent of its own fate. It was obvious that they expected the same resourcefulness and perseverance out of their polar bears that they themselves showed after the military left.
On top of that, so many people in Churchill that I met were also not inclined to believe the climate change story because they resented the messenger. They saw Polar Bears International as carpetbaggers from down south, an elite NGO that set up shop every fall and flew in a pageant of scientists and overachieving American high-schoolers, and capitalized on Churchill’s polar bears without much meaningful interaction with Churchill itself. At the Legion Hall that night, everyone was quick to point out the obvious synergy between PBI and the tour company Frontiers North: the more PBI muscled the media into talking about climate change, the faster tourists would pay Frontiers North for the chance to see the animals before they disappeared. Money was presumed to be changing hands somehow, and virtually everyone at the table was convinced that Robert Buchanan is secretly a part owner of Frontiers North—that he had engineered the whole masterful scheme.
The real victim was the bear, they told me. “All I know is that I’m tired of people feeling guilty about coming up to see polar bears. It’s absolutely unfair to the bears,” said Kelsey Eliasson, a contemplative younger guy with gnarled facial hair. He’d come to Churchill in 1999 as an idealistic environmentalist—he owned a composting toilet and a van that ran on vegetable oil. “I believed,” he told me. “I was a believer. I was an annoying eco-freako.” But he was turned off by the way he saw activists like Polar Bears International “Disney-fying” the bear. They played up its vulnerability, twisting it into a cuddly sob story, and it made Kelsey wonder if climate scientists spun the truth in similar ways. “Now I don’t even know whether to believe in climate change anymore,” he said.
A guy a few seats down, who’d been silent, reached around to pat Kelsey on the back. “We always believed somewhere down the road that you’d come around,” he said. His name was Dennis Compayre. People called him Dennis the Bear Man. He had longish, sandy hair, and resembled a thick-set Dennis Hopper. He was imposing, but enunciated all of his words perfectly with the breathy, faintly patrician voice of a Haverford comp-lit professor.
Dennis had driven Tundra Buggies from the very beginning, in 1982, until his friend Len Smith sold the business to Frontiers North. He loved polar bears and, after parting ways with the new ownership, still wanted to be able to spend bear season on the tundra with them. So, in 2000, he dug his old rig, Buggy One, out of a boneyard, rebuilt the machine, and soon talked Frontiers North into going into business with him. He installed a webcam on Buggy One’s roof, drove it into the viewing area, and camped in it all fall, beaming grainy footage of bears and keeping an online diary for a few hundred paid subscribers.
Early one morning during Dennis’s second autumn, Dancer came knocking—thundering on the hull of Buggy One like a friendly drunk who’d lost his keys. Dancer was a huge male polar bear who’d hung around the early photography tours in the eighties. That was the lard-tossing era, before feeding bears was illegal, and by feeding Dancer, Dennis had taught the bear to walk backward on his hind legs—to dance. “It’s a terrible thing, I know,” he told me. “Like a circus act.” Twenty years later, Dancer seemed to remember Dennis and Buggy One. He immediately started doing the dance. And from then on, and every bear season for the next several years while Dennis ran his “bear cam,” Dancer would trail right behind Buggy One like a loyal hound. The media loved it, and the man and bear gained an international following. Then, after the 2005 season, Frontiers North leased Buggy One to Polar Bears International. Dennis was out. Only so many vehicles are allowed on the tundra, and, given the urgency of the climate crisis, Dennis—this feral Lebowski of a man, throwing the occasional sausage to the dancing polar bear behind him—did not seem to be leveraging that access in a productive or meaningful way. His audience was small. He was off-message. As Robert Buchanan put it to me, “His webcam didn’t have much of a consumer franchise.”
Polar Bears International overhauled Buggy One again, rebuilding its interior so that, in a matter of minutes, it can be transformed into a mobile television studio. Now during bear season PBI and its partners fly in a different panel of polar bear and climate specialists every week and broadcast live chats from the tundra to schoolkids and college classrooms, or to jam-packed special events at zoos. PBI has branded these brief talk-show-style programs Tundra Connections.
I felt bad for Dennis. I’d heard he could be a disagreeable man, but, still, he’d lost his pet project. And he felt something else was being lost, too. “People come up here now with a lump in their throat because they think this bear is doomed,” he told me. “Not for the joy of being with a bear, and seeing a bear in the wild. That’s secondary now.” The animal was being diminished, d
isparaged. He couldn’t conceive of the need to grease a wild animal into a sympathetic environmental “franchise,” just as, thirty years earlier, people in Churchill couldn’t understand why National Geographic felt obligated to frame the bear as a cage-rattling monster. It was as though, the closer you were to the actual bears, the harder they were to square with any one story—even, in the case of climate change, with the truth.
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EXTINCTION IS NOT AN EASY IDEA to get your head around. Centuries ago, as the first colonists hacked away at the wilderness of the eastern seaboard, they sometimes noticed that the deer or wolves they were encroaching on and killing disappeared rapidly from the immediate area. But the possibility that a species could be annihilated totally, everywhere, was literally inconceivable: it occurred to almost no one.
Partly, this had to do with the way people imagined America. In such an infinite-seeming space, brimming with wild things, surely there’d always be somewhere else for these displaced animals to go. But it also had to do with how people imagined nature. All species were believed to be part of a “Great Chain of Being”—a sturdy hierarchy into which God had ordered and fixed all living things, from bugs and slugs all the way up to angels. The idea that any part of God’s perfect chain could be destroyed was both illogical and sacrilegious. “Such is the economy of nature,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” I was finding a vestige of this idea around Churchill—the attitude that, as long as the change in the climate was natural, it couldn’t threaten the bears. Nature, Jefferson argued, is not in the business of driving its own animals extinct.
Jefferson was writing in the early 1780s, in a book called Notes on the State of Virginia. He was defending his decision to include the mammoth in a preceding list of contemporary American animals, even though no one had encountered a mammoth alive. Mammoth fossils—one-pound teeth and femurs larger than my daughter—had started to be unearthed nearly a hundred years earlier, first in upstate New York and later from an area in Kentucky dubbed Big Bone Lick. Confronted with mammoth fossils, Jefferson, like others, saw no reason to believe that herds of these giant animals weren’t still grazing across the “unexplored and undisturbed” interior of the continent. “Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us to say what it does not contain,” he argued. Years later, he’d advise Lewis and Clark to keep their eyes peeled for these monsters. Americans had begun calling the mammoth the American Incognitum, Latin for “unknown.”