by Jon Mooallem
PBI has run the Project Polar Bear competition since 2008. It sets teams of teenagers around the world to the task of identifying and implementing ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their communities. The team that corks up the most carbon wins a trip to Churchill. That year, there were two winning teams. The “Canuck Nanooks” were a family affair: the four polite and baby-faced Vickery sisters, who ranged in age from fourteen to twenty, and hailed from a rural hamlet outside Winnipeg. The other team, from Louisville, Kentucky, called itself “There for Tomorrow.”
These were Polar Bears International’s youngest, most heartfelt “Arctic Ambassadors.” There was a patch that said as much on the sleeves of their matching blue PBI parkas. “Ambassador” was a word that Robert took very seriously. I’d noticed during the past week that he has a catalog of little stump speeches he draws on when talking to journalists. One of the key ones describes his mission to convert “tourists” into “ambassadors.” Over breakfast one morning, Robert had laid the speech on me, then stopped to unpack the meaning of the word.
Being among wild polar bears on the tundra has the potential to truly reshape people, he told me. “I call it ‘the Connection,’” he said. “The ultimate Connection is when someone is able to look in the bear’s eyes. That bear will reach into your heart and your soul, and you are changed forever.” The Connection isn’t tree-hugging fluff, Robert went on; it’s Marketing 101. Making eye contact with a bear “screams,” as they say in the ad game. It screams the way the lavish, omni-colored box of Froot Loops screams to a kid in the grocery aisle. It grabs you and touches you on a level beyond intellect, demanding your compassion. An “ambassador,” Robert told me, is someone who makes the Connection and then goes home committed to helping that polar bear and its compatriots in the wild. A tourist is just looking to be entertained. Tourists go home and only start planning their next vacation. “But if you’re coming all the way up here just to see polar bears so you can check them off your list,” Robert said, “if you’re coming for your own self-interest, do me a favor: don’t fucking come. You can see it on the Discovery Channel.” The carbon emissions generated by flying to Churchill are astronomic, he said. You have to offset them with action.
Now, as our buggy jolted over slushy potholes, the teenagers seemed to whirr in their seats with an anticipatory high. They snapped photos of each other flashing peace signs, and then double peace signs, and invented and practiced handshakes in which peace signs turned into the wriggling antennae of a snail. Some of the younger Vickerys sang. There was now at least a thin dusting of snow on the ground, and what’s known as grease ice had finally started clumping on Hudson Bay, undulating with the tide beneath it, like the skin on a cup of cream of mushroom soup.
We found our first bear only a few minutes outside the launch site. Wandee held up Isla so she could see, and I wedged myself in behind them. The bear lay with its neck stretched forward and its eyes closed. One of its flanks was tinted red by the rising sun. The sight of the animal abruptly silenced everyone on board. As people shifted to that side of the buggy and drew down the windows, all you could hear was the quiet whizzing and clicking of digital cameras. This hush was familiar. I’d been on several buggy rides, and it happened at every first sighting, either out of reverence for the animal, or just because everyone was so instantaneously stupefied by the spectacle of an actual, wild polar bear that it didn’t occur to them to talk. But this time, the quiet of the congregation was broken by my daughter, shouting shrilly into the wind. “Wake up, polar bear!” Isla said.
—
ISLA MADE A POINT of talking to several polar bears that day. She was still feeling her way into language, and her crimped way of expressing herself reminded me of how, in nature documentaries, a just-born giraffe will skitter on its matchstick legs before finding its footing. She had lots of questions: whether polar bears liked jelly; why she couldn’t go out there with them. At one point, we watched a lone animal stand up and retreat. The bear wasn’t in good shape. Its ribs were visible faintly under its fur, like a name materializing in a gravestone etching.
Isla said, “Whoa.”
“‘Whoa’ is right,” said Sam Leist, an irrepressibly likable kid on the Louisville team.
Then Isla said, “Where do bears poo-poo?” and I watched Sam pull a befuddled, kindly half-smile, searching for any possible point of entry, before turning back to the window and raising his binoculars again. Frequently, my daughter just shouted, “That bear’s too big!” with a mix of disapproval and disbelief.
I’d been prepping Isla for the trip with polar bear footage on YouTube and by making a point of lingering on pictures of polar bears that popped up in our bedtime reading. I never presumed to know what she was experiencing or thinking—the emotional life of a child seems just as ungraspable as an animal’s to me—but now, out on the tundra, I swore I saw in her some elemental experience of astonishment, the recognition of a familiar fiction materializing before her eyes. That’s the experience Churchill’s tourism industry is selling, after all, though we grown-ups can be more self-conscious about giving ourselves over to it.
At lunchtime, we parked at a bend in the coastline, and Robert and our driver set out sandwiches and soup. Someone noticed that a bear we’d previously seen in the distance was heading straight to us, hugging the shore. Maybe it was attracted to the smell of lunch. “She’s going to come right alongside and check us out,” Robert whispered to the kids as the animal crept within a dozen yards. Soon the polar bear was underneath his window, and he leaned over the edge and exhaled rhythmically, shooting muffled, punctuated breaths to attract the bear, wanting it to rise up and paw the side of the buggy as bears often do. Nearby, Sam blew in his hands and whispered, “You’re beautiful, aren’t you?”
We hadn’t noticed somehow that this female was being followed by a smaller bear: a cub, or maybe a yearling. It was hard to tell. The adults aboard the buggy noted that the young bear looked unusually thin. It hunched by a back wheel. But when it got too close to the female, the larger bear huffed loudly and feigned a charge. The yearling turned and trotted away, spinning its head back toward the female as it ran. It stopped. Then, after a minute, it moved closer again.
This happened several times. Finally, the female flushed the younger bear for good and hauled off in the opposite direction. Suddenly, everyone on board was talking again, weaving a speculative story to explain what we’d seen. Maybe the female had weaned the yearling and was now chasing it away, as mother polar bears do. Or maybe the yearling wasn’t actually her offspring, but an orphan—maybe a climate change orphan—and was trying to make this other female its surrogate mother. What we’d seen was either a brutal part of nature or a natural part of a brutal new trend. No one could say. It remained a drama with no narrative.
After lunch, Robert stood at the front of the buggy and asked people what their favorite moments of the day were so far.
“Having a bear make a connection with me,” the youngest Vickery sister, Madison, said.
“And what is a connection?” Robert asked her.
“Having a bear look you in the eye, and you look at it,” she said. She thought for a second. “There’s no words to describe it.”
“What about feelings?” Robert said. “What did people feel?”
Sam said, “Respect.”
Robert seemed to like that. “That’s a very important one,” he told the students. He said that what he always feels is a kind of rattling insignificance: “The feeling that my problems are silly.” And before I even realized it, he’d shuffled into the most signature of his signature riffs—the canned speech that would be written on that winter’s Polar Bears International Christmas card to donors and which I’d already heard several times. It was a genuinely affecting monologue about how improbable and precious our Earth actually is—a paradise, “possibly the Garden of Eden itself”; a “little blue marble,” suspended on the tail of the Milky Way. “If someone has given us a gift as mag
nificent as this,” Robert would say, “I think we better take good care of it.”
Frankly, it was a little unsettling how expertly Robert drilled his ambassadors, reinforcing his own talking points. It felt just slightly too manipulative, like an indoctrination—even to me, who believed wholeheartedly in the cause Polar Bears International was indoctrinating these kids into. In town, I’d listened to guys like Dennis the Bear Man criticize PBI for brainwashing the students they bring to Churchill. (“Some of these kids are babbling idiots by the time their week’s over,” Dennis said. “They’re so neurotic and worried about saving the world. My God, I’m sure they must have nightmares.”) And suddenly I could appreciate these men’s disgust—not with Robert personally, but with the fact that it has come to this; that the experience of just being near these animals has become so loaded and solemn; that we’ve turned the polar bear into a psychic pack animal and heaped our shame, disquiet, and hope on its back.
“I love you,” Robert told the kids, rounding out his blue marble speech. “I’m proud of you. Thanks for helping straighten out what we messed up.”
—
THE EPISODE WITH THE FEMALE and the yearling was by far our buggy’s closest and most dramatic encounter of the day. Isla missed it. She’d gotten restless, no longer appeased by the chocolate chips we’d been dispensing like SeaWorld trainers reaching into their fanny packs for smelt. Then, quietly, mercifully, she had fallen asleep in Wandee’s arms, her hand shoved down the neck of Wandee’s shirt in lieu of holding a stuffed animal.
When the two bears approached, Wandee and I had agreed it was unwise to wake her. We were only four hours into at least an eight-hour day, and—to be honest—I never quite appreciated the magical appeal of staring into the eyes of a polar bear at close range anyway. It only reminded me of the artificiality of the situation in Churchill, the kind of reverse zoo that the tundra has become. It’s the tourists, confined to a buggy, that depend on the polar bears to approach and interact with them. And if none do, many buggy drivers told me, it’s the tourists who get bored or sometimes even insolent, griping on the ride home and stiffing their driver on tips. To me, the most moving part was always when a bear was done investigating the buggy and turned around and padded away, and how it kept getting smaller and smaller, swallowed by the endless negative space around it.
When Isla woke, I tried to explain what had happened outside. She pulled herself up to the window but could stare only at the vacant snow and ice. Sam was nice enough to show her the video he’d taken of the mother and yearling’s stand-off; for Isla, in other words, it wound up being just another digital video clip. She watched with blank eyes. But when, on the screen of Sam’s camera, the female huffed and the yearling trotted away—its head turned, its legs quickening into a momentary gambol—Isla seemed to experience that shock of recognition again. She looked at Sam, then at her mother and me, and said, very confidently, “Horses do that.”
In retrospect, what I remember most about our day on the tundra is an overwhelming feeling of relief—how struck I was that Isla was actually enjoying herself. I’d been focused on what the experience might come to mean for her years or decades later, as though it were a financial investment or a vaccination. I’d forgotten that watching polar bears could be fun.
We’d been in Churchill together for a couple of days already, and so much of what Isla was encountering there was spectacularly new to her: walking on snow, sliding on ice, shooting down the tremendous polar-bear-shaped slide in the town’s recreation center; the hilarious rustle that her snowsuit made when she ran back and forth down our hotel hallway. And she still seemed to have no saturation point—for her, newness never got old. In the last moments of our Tundra Buggy tour, we pulled alongside a small bear, slogging toward us from the middle distance. Isla leaned out of Wandee’s arms and through the window. Then she turned to me and said, “Look, Daddy! Polar bear!” as though it were still surprising, as though the only two words she had for that thing still needed to be said out loud.
5.
THE LIFT
After we got home to San Francisco, I got an e-mail from Daniel J. Cox, an accomplished photographer who’s been going to Churchill to shoot polar bears for twenty years and now volunteers for Polar Bears International as their in-house photographer every bear season.
Cox had been on a buggy with a tour for wildlife photographers when they came across a distressingly gaunt female polar bear fidgeting behind a snowbank. The temperature had finally dropped, and the wind was flaring, and this particular bear, without much fat left on her for insulation, was struggling to find a comfortable resting position. Her movements were erratic. Her shoulder blades arced above her head like a wishbone.
There was still no ice on Hudson Bay. The bears had come onto land that summer between late June and mid-July. They ultimately wouldn’t get back on the ice until around December 4, having spent as long as 162 days on land, or forty more days than what used to be considered normal, and maybe far longer than many cubs would be equipped to last. It was shaping up to be the sort of potentially cataclysmic off-year that the biologist Andrew Derocher had warned me about.
As Cox and his group watched, another, fitter polar bear approached the withered female. The female labored to ratchet herself onto her feet and eventually scuttled out of the snowbank to charge it and scare it away. As she did, the twin cubs clustered under her body for warmth came into view for the first time.
One of the cubs rose to look around. Its face was lithe and fluffy; it looked more like a wolf pup than a bear. It started to lean backward strangely, like a tree bending in a wind. Then its face and mouth twitched. Then the twitching radiated into the rest of its body and intensified. The cub was seizing up—convulsing in what veterinarians later assessed to be the last phases of starvation. As it shook, the mother sat stoically beside it, swiveling her neck back and forth, scanning the tundra. The cub died shortly after. Its sibling died two days after that.
Cox was e-mailing me a short video of the episode that he’d filmed and posted online. The footage seemed to have the potential to go viral and become iconic, a concise and transfixing scene of the violence of climate change, which is otherwise slow and abstract. Cox had put in a title card, explaining that, although science could never link the starvation of these two specific cubs to climate change, this was exactly what biologists expected to see more often. And he tricked out the scene with some acoustic guitar and cello music: This made it even more sorrowful without tipping into melodrama.
I’d read in many scientific papers about increased rates of starvation among cubs. But seeing a cub spasm and stagger through its last moments is a different experience, of course. Watching the video felt incriminating in the most paradoxical way: I felt unsettled by how much power our species is wielding on the planet, and I also felt powerless. In a way, the video represented the conclusion of the same story the teddy bear helped tell back in 1902: now, finally, society’s reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world and demeaned even the most remote and mightiest bears.
Still, some people who watched the video asked a question that hadn’t occurred to me: why hadn’t Cox put down his camera and called in wildlife officials to feed the cubs, or even chucked out some of the tour group’s hamburger meat? Some saw the video as an exploitative snuff film. It played right into the cynicism I’d encountered in Churchill about the motives of modern polar bear conservation—the suspicion that it’s all empty PR. I’d come to realize that people in Churchill cared just as passionately about the species as anyone in Polar Bears International does. But if you refuse to accept the premise of climate change, as they did, then you also reject the idea that the survival of polar bears hinges on influencing some opaque emotional calculus of far-flung SUV drivers and politicians and the size of their carbon footprints. You believe, instead, that the survival of polar bears depends on the survival of polar bears—the physical welfare of the individual animals on the land. Dan Cox believ
ed his footage could help polar bears. But you had to make a certain mental leap to see it that way. In the simplest terms, it was a video of him not helping polar bears.
Nasty comments proliferated online. Some people were angry. (“Shame on you, Mr. Cox, shame on you!”) But some seemed only to feel betrayed, unsure what exactly they, as donors to Polar Bears International, were supporting. “Your agency is out there to help and protect these magnificent animals,” one person wrote. (Cox had posted the video on his own Web site, but his affiliation with PBI is well-known.) One way for people to contribute to PBI is by “adopting a polar bear cub.” And though it is only a “symbolic adoption”—for $100, you get an adoption certificate, a tote bag, and a gourmet white-chocolate polar bear—it was hard to reconcile that messaging with what they saw in the video.
Cox wrote a response, and leading bear biologists lined up to defend him, noting, for starters, that feeding bears is illegal, and that the cub was in such poor condition that it was likely to die regardless. But they most of all stressed that feeding individual bears would only put a Band-Aid on the problem of climate change—it missed the point. Robert Buchanan told me that the reactions he saw were indicative of a knee-jerk, “bunny-hugging” attitude that, frankly, he can’t stand. Here were folks who burn a disproportionate share of the world’s fossil fuels feeling self-righteous about polar bears. “They’re killing polar bears from the comfort of their easy chairs,” Robert told me. “Excuse my expression, but fuck ’em.”
There’s no accounting for the polar bear’s magnetism. The bear seems to have evolved to wrench out human emotion as efficiently as it evolved to rip ringed seals out of the ice. Robert was betting the species’ survival on that appeal. He believed that that emotional connection could be enlarged and channeled into action. But the empathy that Cox’s video generated almost seemed to be too much—too raw and unwieldy to be channeled into anything.