Twilight of the Ice Bear
December 13, 2009
By BRUCE BARCOTT
NYT
ON THIN ICE: The Changing World of the Polar Bear
By Richard Ellis
Illustrated. 400 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95
Not long ago I strolled through Longyearbyen, in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The place was bear crazy. Polar bear iconography appeared everywhere: on T-shirts, coffee mugs, sweaters and holiday ornaments. At the edge of town there was a sign that read, roughly translated, “Beyond Here There Be Bears.” Tourists were warned not to wander past the sign unarmed, lest they be eaten by a bear.
Behind the bear-friendly facade, though, there was an unsettling paradox. If Longyearbyen’s major import was polar bear trinkets, its major export was polar bear poison: coal. The mines of Svalbard supply about four million tons to Europe every year. The burning of coal, along with oil and gas, has led to global warming, which is melting the sea ice upon which the polar bear spends most of its life.
In Longyearbyen, the complexity of the human relationship to the polar bear is on stark display: we love its seeming cuddliness, admire and fear its monstrous strength and find ourselves incapable of breaking the carbon-fuel addiction that’s threatening the bear’s survival as a species.
(Continued here.)
By BRUCE BARCOTT
NYT
ON THIN ICE: The Changing World of the Polar Bear
By Richard Ellis
Illustrated. 400 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95
Not long ago I strolled through Longyearbyen, in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The place was bear crazy. Polar bear iconography appeared everywhere: on T-shirts, coffee mugs, sweaters and holiday ornaments. At the edge of town there was a sign that read, roughly translated, “Beyond Here There Be Bears.” Tourists were warned not to wander past the sign unarmed, lest they be eaten by a bear.
Behind the bear-friendly facade, though, there was an unsettling paradox. If Longyearbyen’s major import was polar bear trinkets, its major export was polar bear poison: coal. The mines of Svalbard supply about four million tons to Europe every year. The burning of coal, along with oil and gas, has led to global warming, which is melting the sea ice upon which the polar bear spends most of its life.
In Longyearbyen, the complexity of the human relationship to the polar bear is on stark display: we love its seeming cuddliness, admire and fear its monstrous strength and find ourselves incapable of breaking the carbon-fuel addiction that’s threatening the bear’s survival as a species.
(Continued here.)
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