New Scientist: Want to save polar bears? Focus on they’re already safest
A smallish story in the current New Scientist provides some badly-needed perspective on arguments over the fate of polar bears and how to do anything locally that offsets a diffuse problem, climate change, whose causes are far from their native habitat. Writers Stephanie Pfirman and Bruno Tremblay have it under the hed We still have a chance to save polar bears.
The authors are not, one must mention, science writers or any other kinds of journalists. Each is a professor of climate sciences. She is at Columbia in New York City, he at McGill in Montreal. The magazine labels the article “Opinion,” which it is. Their argument is an end run around the hand wringing by US officials and their state counterparts in Alaska over what’s the best way to protect US populations of the big bears – which occupy one of the regions of the circum-Arctic most heavily affected by loss of sea ice and dwindling polar bear prey. There are, however and as this piece notes, places that will remain secure for the bears for a good long time – and where other management actions such as establishing refuges against development, heavy hunting pressure, or other factors make good sense. Tracker’s inference of their subtext: the Alaskan polar bear is pretty much a goner.
The article accompanies a second, more conventional news piece in NS by Shanta Barley on the recent decision by the US Dept of Interior and its Fish and Wildlife Service to open hearings on a designated critical habitat along Alaska’s shores.
Ditto, another follow on last week’s habitat designation news is at the New York Times by Stefan Milkowski: Polar Bears vs. Development in Alaska. On this issue, The new governor up there is same as the old boss (followed in one’s brain by a riff from Won’t Get Fooled Again).
- Charlie Petit
